Friday, September 25, 2009

ESPN Working The Dayshift On Saturday

The sports car race is called The Petit Le Mans. It will be shown on SPEED from 11AM to 9PM ET live on Saturday. Needless to say, that means there will be no NASCAR on SPEED from Dover during the dayshift.

Instead, ESPN will offer Nationwide Series qualifying, the Nationwide Series race and finally coverage of Happy Hour for the Sprint Cup Series.

Marty Reid is back on the Nationwide Series this week, but once again he has Dale Jarrett and Andy Petree with him. Those two are pulling double duty in Dover handling all the Sprint Cup and Nationwide Series TV. Perhaps, not the best idea.

Reid starts the day on ESPN2 at 10:30AM with Nationwide Series qualifying. As veteran NASCAR fans know, qualifying has not been a strong point for ESPN. The production format eliminates much of the actual on-track action and over-uses graphics and interviews during what should be a singular focus on just one car at a time.

The ESPN pit reporters will join Petree and Jarrett for this program. The weak line-up of the Nationwide Series will be bolstered by the cross-over Sprint Cup drivers. There are eight of them this week. This group has been the consistent emphasis for ESPN with the Nationwide coverage where interviews are concerned. Brad Keselowski may be the lone exception to that rule.

There is a college football game that starts at 12PM on ESPN2 this Saturday. Despite the fact that these games run 3.5 hours, once again the NASCAR Countdown pre-race show is scheduled for only three hours after kickoff. Luckily, ESPN Classic has a wonderful marathon of the New American Sportsman in progress at that time. Fans may well see the Nationwide Series pre-race show on Classic.

NASCAR Countdown will be Allen Bestwick along with Brad Daugherty and Rusty Wallace live from the Infield Pit Studio. During the last race, these three offered more enthusiasm and entertainment than Reid, Jarrett and Petree combined.

It will be 3:30PM when the live race telecast gets underway, hopefully on ESPN2. Tim Brewer will also be along from the Tech Garage, although laps at Dover are so fast and exciting he should only be seen during caution periods or in the smaller of the two video boxes in the split-screen. It is September and fans have been watching since February. Pointing at car parts this late in the season often makes very little sense.

While the three announcers upstairs struggle to find a winning combination, the ESPN production team is going to be facing the same old Dover. Two bridges over the track need to be cut-out of the TV pictures, the accidents happen with lightning speed and in-car camera shots used live are risky.

At 6PM, there is another big college football game scheduled for ESPN2. Should this race have several long caution flags, a red flag period or some rain, it will be interesting to see whether football or NASCAR interrupts the world famous New American Sportsman marathon over on ESPN Classic once again.

The wrap-up of the day is Happy Hour for the Sprint Cup Series scheduled for 7PM over on ESPN. This NASCAR program has live college football on both sides. Needless to say, it should be interesting to see how the day has progressed by the time 7PM rolls around.

SPEED finally pokes into the NASCAR world with the Camping World Truck Series race coverage. The pre-race show begins at 9PM and TDP will live blog that telecast. The only airing of NASCAR Performance with Larry McReynolds, Chad Knaus and Bootie Barker will follow the race at 12:30AM.

For comments before, during and after the ESPN dayshift NASCAR coverage on Saturday, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind while posting your TV-related comments. Thanks for stopping by.

31 comments:

Kitch
said...

According to an article at SpeedTV.com SPEED's Petit Le Mans coverage begins at 11.00am and runs for 10.5 hours. That would make the Truck pre-race show not start until 9.30pm ET.

"SPEED, the definitive network for motor sports and the automotive lifestyle, will provide ten-and-a-half hours of live ‘flag to flag’ coverage from this year’s American Le Mans Series (ALMS) Petit Le Mans fall endurance classic starting Saturday, Sept. 26 at 11 a.m., ET, from picturesque Road Atlanta, just north of the city."

Love Dover... but when it comes to NW, there's just too many Cup drivers that suck the life out. Still, if I had to choose 'tween than and the Chaseism of Sunday... I'll go NW on MRN. As for all the qual/final practc, I get that enough on Fri (where it bores me).

There are an abnormal number of NFL games starting on Sunday at 1 PM. A dozen games all starting at 1:00 PM ET may drain away some audience as Allen Bestwick hosts the pre-race show for the Sprint Cup Series race. Let's hope all three are incredibly enthused in the Infield Pit Studio.

Idea:ABC needs to do some "teases" for this show, Spencer bloopers, show pics of Danica or something! ;-)

It never ends early! It's always the ten hours. Once the night comes, with the slower cars on track around the ultra-fast prototypes, accidents happen. And if there is still rain in the forecast, well...

Amen to that. It's going to be an epic race and one that deserves to go live, flag-to-flag. SPEED do a great job. Leigh Diffey and Brian Till are great PxP guys. Dorsey and Calbin are awesome analysts, and the pit reporters, unlike those on ESPN, actually add serious and important bits of info to the telecast. No "how do you feel" questions.

Hopefully the rain does hold off for the Nationwide race. It would be a disastor if the Dover race goes long & into the college football game. ESPN really needs ESPN 3 at the moment. Football-Race-Football is not working.

Football (college and NFL) has priority on all networks and racing (except the Indy 500) is a "filler" sport. It will be this way as long as the sports overlap because the people making decisions grew up with football and NA$CAR is a recent sport to them. Nobody in power grew up in the southeast where the roots of NA$CAR are.

"If college football is so great, why don't they have their own channel?"

They do, several. ESPN has ESPNU, FSN has 3 Fox College Sports Channels. There is the Big 10 Network, The MTN, CBS College Sports, etc. The public has a high demand for college football, so it spills over everywhere.

Where does ESPN get its stats?... Shannon tells Carl Edwards he's won 3 of the last 4 races and he was really surprised to hear that. He didn't! He finished 2nd at Bristol, so he's only won 2 of the last 3.

I was surprised at Shannon's statement too - knew that couldn't be right and she wasn't. Wish Randy was doing this qualifying with Marty instead of the other two he's probably on cloud nine today after his son, Corey's, 3rd place finish in the Camping World East series race yesterday.

Still don't understand the NASCAR media writing off Danica. Only 17 IRL weekends in 2010. Plenty of time for trucks &n'wide races

----------------------

I don't either, DPE

If people actually bothered to read Ed Hinton's original article on this, he clearly stated she would re-sign with AGR and in addition to that she would be running some races in the Nationwide/Trucks series.

Not that she'd pick one series to run in over the other.

From Curt Cavin's Q&A today

http://blogs.indystar.com/racingexpert/

Question: With Danica signing with AGR for another three years and Tony Stewart saying she will eventually switch to NASCAR, what is being said about her AGR contract allowing some limited NASCAR events so she can get some experience in the larger/heavier cars? (Mark, Fishers, Ind.)

Answer: Michael Andretti said her contract will allow her to do some things as they pertain to stock cars, although right now it doesn't appear she has anything specifically in mind. We'll have to wait on that one.

WC DianeThat's something when cleaning house w/o NASCAR stuff on is more fun but indeed, BSPN sucks all the life out of things.

The BWINS really need to get their acts together. No excuse.

I had on SPEED for a short while Friday just to hear the voices...Steve and the guys are like "comfort food" to listen to in comparison.

Today I don't know if I will watch the NW race. I will go out for a quick bite and music for a couple hours but getting AGGRAVATED with ESPN coverage could put me in a bad mood before I leave the house. So why bother you know?

It's just a SHAME ESPN continues to do that. Also the demeanor of drivers being interviewed of SPEED guys is night and day.